WRITERS ASK ISSUE 77 EXCERPTS

Once I was "inside" the stories, writing them, I took what floated up. I trusted in that part of myself over which I had little control: my imagination—that busy little factory that spun the straw of reality into the gold of fiction, that took everything I had read and heard, everything that I knew and was, all my nightmares and old ghosts to create the stories that made up this book. —Louise Farmer Smith

Having a title in place early has often helped me consider the piece in a more serious way. —Andrew Scott, interviewed by Sahar Mustafah

What a short story does is, it more realistically mirrors what it means to live in the real, where sometimes we feel our lives are divided by chapters. Where we remember a person that we used to love, and in that moment they were everything and now they are completely gone from us. —Junot Díaz, interviewed by David Naimon

The writer's job is to live in the flux but to perceive a shape in it, to find the story and to trace the arc of the human experience. —Beth Ann Fennelly, interviewed by Kevin Rabalais

Life is pocked with deviations bizarre and unexpected, deviations that can't be explained. Not convincingly, anyway. By adding such deviations to our fictions, we make our work both more memorable and more realistic, a sincere representation of the nonlinear ways our lives unfold. —Sean Bernard